Apple Tree Yard

by Louise Doughty

  ‘Oh dear…’ you say. ‘Oh dear…’

  11

  I am in a mini-supermarket close to my house when you call. It is a week after the email incident and my collapse at the one-day conference. Since then, I have cancelled as much as I can and stayed at home. So here I am, handbag on one shoulder and wire shopping basket in the other hand, standing in front of the newspaper rack and staring at a tabloid newspaper. It has a picture of a famous footballer on the front, a family man, a role model for the youth of today. He has been arrested. The four-letter word is huge. It sells newspapers, after all.

  It is everywhere. It is in every television drama, news item, casual conversation. It is waiting for me when I pop into my local Costcutter for a pint of milk and a lettuce. At the moment that you decide to ring me, I am rooted in the aisle and I have just decided that I can’t stand it any more. I am about to rip the newspapers from their stands and throw them to the floor. I will punch the poor shop assistant who will rush to stop me.

  ‘Hi,’ I say to you. I now understand the origins of the phrase, my heart was in my mouth. It’s more in my throat, I think, not just my heart, all my internal organs, it’s like everything is shoved up beneath my chin. I can’t breathe.

  ‘Listen,’ you say, your voice brisk. ‘There’s someone I want you to talk to.’

  ‘OK…’ I say slowly.

  ‘He’s a police officer,’ you say. ‘Specially trained, one of the ones I’ve told you about…’

  I cut across you. ‘I’ve told you I can’t, you know I can’t…’ I am standing in my local supermarket, in the newspaper aisle, hissing into my phone at my lover. ‘You know why I can’t. We just can’t, that’s it.’

  ‘Just meet this man,’ you say. ‘He’s happy to give us some informal advice. I’ve briefed him. He can help talk you through the options.’

  I press the phone to my ear. I think how tired I am of telephone conversations with you – not tired of them, I suppose, tired of their limitations. Telephone calls, cafés – that’s all we are and it’s no longer enough. A woman with a pushchair shoves past me, banging the back of my heel with one of the wheels rather than saying excuse me. I shoot her a venomous look. She shoots it right back. The world is full of aggression and unpleasantness, and I am about to add to it by losing it, badly, in Costcutter.

  ‘What would happen if she found out?’ I ask. ‘Your wife. What would happen, if you were a witness in court and everything about us came out, not just the sex, the type of sex, where and when?’

  ‘She would throw me out,’ you say simply.

  ‘You would lose everything.’

  And then you say, without flourish or emphasis, ‘If you want to go to court, I will stand in the dock and tell them what you told me. It’s called early reporting. It doesn’t mean reporting it to the police, necessarily, you can report a crime to anyone and it counts. You reported it to me. I’ll stand in the dock and say so.’

  ‘Everything about us will come out.’

  ‘Not necessarily. No one knows about us after all.’ Yes, they do, I think. George Craddock knows about us. He doesn’t know your identity but he knows of your existence and you can be sure it will be the first thing he will mention when they question him. I haven’t told you about what I said to him. I’m too ashamed. To have betrayed you in that manner, stupidly, drunkenly, and with such consequences – how can I admit to that? It is the only thing I have ever withheld from you.

  ‘You would lose everything,’ I say. ‘Your marriage, your home, your job maybe…’ I love you, I think. But I don’t say it, I say, ‘It’s not just about protecting you, it’s about protecting myself, my family, my home, my job too.’

  ‘And now you’re saying that so that I don’t feel bad about the fact you can’t go to court because of me.’

  And despite it all, I smile, as I wander away from the newspapers to the fruit and veg aisle. I have to put the phone in the crook of my neck while I reach out for an iceberg lettuce with one hand and toss it into the basket I am holding with the other.

  ‘Let’s just meet my friend for a coffee,’ you say. ‘It can’t do any harm.’

  It did do us some degree of harm, later.

  *

  We meet in a chain coffee store in the West End. You and I meet first. For once, you are waiting for me when I arrive. You are already seated at a small round table with three chairs, two coffees in styrofoam cups on the table and a piece of carrot cake. I look at you and you give me a soft, warm look. ‘Carrot cake,’ I say. You smile.

  We don’t talk about the discussion we are about to have. I had imagined we would lay down a few rules, what we can or can’t say – it is still vital that nobody knows about us, after all. But it is as though we both feel the need to be a bit normal. We talk about what we watched on television the previous night.

  When the friend comes in, I am somehow surprised, even though I didn’t know what to expect. He holds out a hand and introduces himself as Kevin. He is a small, wiry man in a navy-blue suit. He is young, but has thinning hair and a dark moustache. He strikes me as the kind of man who is normally very mild-mannered but who could, if the situation demanded it, be a right hard bastard.

  He and you nod at each other, and I have the feeling that you are more respectful acquaintances than friends. I wonder if, perhaps, you have done him a favour of some sort in the past and now he is returning it.

  ‘Would you like me to get you a coffee?’ I say, looking round as he seats himself.

  He shakes his head. ‘Thanks, sorry, I don’t have very long.’

  ‘Thanks for coming, Kev,’ you say, soberly. There will be no small talk, I gather, no chumming up. This will be a businesslike discussion. I feel grateful.

  ‘Do you want to tell me the circumstances?’ Kevin says, looking at me. I appreciate his use of euphemism, and knowing that I will not be able to get through this discussion unless I make extensive use of it myself. I leave out the bit about us, of course, everything about us, and our encounter in Apple Tree Yard. You have told Kevin that I am someone you have met through your work at the Houses of Parliament, someone who has come to you for advice, that’s all. I wonder, though, if Kevin has guessed at anything else between us – he’s a detective sergeant, after all. If he has, he gives no sign of it.

  The euphemisms. How mild they seem. ‘He turned me over,’ I say at one point, and Kevin lowers his gaze discreetly.

  I stay calm, articulate, dry-eyed. It occurs to me, briefly, how my calmness, the lack of tears, would count against me if I was making an official complaint. I disassociate, during this. I watch myself giving an account, presenting information in the same way I would present a research paper at a conference or symposium. At the end of it, I fall silent. There is a long pause while you both wait for a bit, to be sure I have finished. I draw a deep breath, then I look at Kevin and say, ‘I need you to be completely honest, about what will happen, if I go to court I mean. I need all the facts before I can make a decision.’ I surprise myself in using this phrase as, up until now, I have been convinced that the decision was already made. ‘I’m not the sort of person who would want you to be tactful, please just tell me.’

  There is a pause, then you say to Kevin, as if to ameliorate my demand for honesty. ‘She had injuries.’

  Kevin cocks his head on one side, frowns. ‘Any restraint injuries?’ he asks. ‘Bruising to the wrists?’ It’s the same question you asked.

  ‘He didn’t restrain me.’ I say. ‘He didn’t need to. I was drunk. He slapped me. It happened too fast.’

  ‘Well, injuries don’t mean anything unless there’s a record of them anyway,’ Kevin says. ‘Unless you’ve been examined by a professional and they are recorded. And even when we have injuries, if the man claims it was consensual S&M, it’s quite hard to prove otherwise.’

  ‘But if he had beaten me to a pulp, then we would be in with a chance?’

  Kevin takes the question seriously. ‘Yes, but the fact that you were drunk
would still count against you. Alcohol is a gift to the defence.’

  I don’t reply because I want Kevin to continue – I need to hear this, all of it.

  Kevin leans forward in his seat. ‘The first thing his solicitor will do, as soon as he’s charged, will be to hire a private detective. Any secrets in your past?’ I keep my gaze on Kevin. I do not look at you. He continues. ‘Internet searches, questioning friends and family and work colleagues, starts with that. If there’s nothing in your present life, they will get to work on your past, starting with tracking down your sexual history, all your old boyfriends. They will be looking for anyone who says you like being hit or you like it rough. Any sex videos, topless photos, that kind of thing.’

  ‘I didn’t think they could do that any more.’

  Kevin gives a small, unamused snort. ‘They can do anything. If they are challenged, all they have to do is give a reason to the judge why it’s relevant to the defence. So any ex-boyfriends who say you like it rough…’

  ‘They won’t find any. I don’t.’

  ‘Your husband…’ Kevin glances at my wedding ring.

  ‘They will go after my husband?’

  ‘Possibly. They might put a private detective on him too. Let’s say, for instance, that your injuries had been recorded by a medical professional, then in that instance they might try to claim they were caused not by their client but by your husband – jealous rage, that kind of thing.’

  I have a brief vision of Guy on a witness stand in court.

  ‘Any mental illness in the family?’

  I look at him.

  ‘You have a history of any sort?’

  You are both looking at me.

  ‘No.’

  Kevin glances at you, then back at me. ‘No mental illness, or depression?’

  ‘Family members, not me.’ There is another pause while you and he wait for me to elaborate. ‘My mother committed suicide when I was eight years old. She had a long history of depression, probably exacerbated by having children.’ I don’t look at you but I can feel you watching me carefully. ‘And when he was sixteen, my son was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, his manic episodes were quite severe. Since then, he’s had three spells in institutions. He’s living in a hostel in Manchester now, he is taking medication, I believe, doing quite well. We’re not really in regular contact though, which is a worry…’ Once I start talking about Adam, I don’t want to stop. This is why I try not to talk about him in daily, ordinary conversation, because I cannot bring myself to discuss my son using generalisations. Anyone who knows about him has to know the whole story, how awful it has been for all of us, how close it has come to destroying our family, how I would give up my work, sell our home and live in a ditch if it would make Adam well. I can say none of this in front of you and this young detective, so I dry to a halt.

  Kevin glances at you as if looking for a clue as to how direct or challenging he can be, then says gently, ‘Manic depression’s hereditary, isn’t it? Your mother, your son…’

  ‘Actually,’ I say, ‘the genetic link isn’t proven, it’s no more than a tendency. Environmental factors can often… often it’s, well, nobody really knows.’

  ‘So you yourself have never fallen ill?’

  I allow myself a wry smile. ‘Well I had therapy for a few months in my twenties, doesn’t everybody?’ I look from you to Kevin, but neither of you smile back. ‘I was young, the children were small, my postgraduate work wasn’t going well, it was just the usual…’ You are both silent. ‘I had a brief spell of post-natal depression after my daughter was born but it was… it was, well it just cleared up after about six months, I didn’t even…’

  Kevin presses his lips together.

  ‘The investigating officers are obliged to tell the defence anything they discover during the course of their investigations that might assist the defence. It’s called disclosure.’ Disclosure is something that will later become crucial to our eventual fate but not in the way we are discussing it here.

  ‘And what about him?’

  Kevin shrugs again. ‘It doesn’t work the other way around. The defence doesn’t have to disclose anything they know about their client. The defence’s only obligation is to get their client off.’

  I pause. ‘My husband can’t know,’ I say. ‘Nor my children. They can’t know either. My son is fragile. We can’t have our lives exposed in court.’

  ‘Ah,’ says Kevin. At this point, a woman with a child in a pushchair pauses close to our table. She is hunting for something in a plastic bag slung over one of the pushchair handles. ‘Here you go,’ she says to the air above pushchair, then bends down and puts a blue plastic rabbit on the lap of the infant strapped into the chair. We wait until they have moved on before continuing.

  ‘You fall into a category my unit calls too-much-to-lose victims,’ Kevin says lightly, in a non-judgemental kind of way. ‘The younger victims, they are often easier to persuade to go to court. To be frank they don’t know what’s coming and don’t ask. But older ones, professional women, you know, they do ask. Although there’s a whole argument within the Service that we shouldn’t say. Some people even think we should be serving victims with witness summons, forcing them to go to court – never going to get conviction rates up otherwise.’

  He sees the alarm on my face. ‘We would never do that, not with someone like you anyway; we do with domestic abuse sometimes, when we know that next time he’s going to kill her.’

  ‘They will set the dogs on me.’ I say this without self-pity. ‘And my family.’

  For this whole discussion you have remained silent, but now you lean forward and say, quietly but earnestly, ‘You are entitled to anonymity.’

  ‘Well, strangers won’t read your name in the newspaper it’s true,’ Kevin says, ‘But any family members who are relevant to the defence can be put on the stand, and all your work colleagues at that party of course.’

  I think how, at that party, there was almost everybody I admired from my professional life, everyone from Frances at the Beaufort Institute to Professor Rochester – and a lot of people who know Guy as well. I think how, if this goes to court, no one will ever talk again about how I was the first person to qualify the Wedekind experiment. Mine is the generation that moved from hand sequencing verbally, in pairs, sitting on stools in labs for hours on end, to placing samples directly into million-dollar computers the size of industrial washing machines. We are the pioneers of protein sequencing – I worked with a team that named genes as they were discovered, names that will last as long as science itself. But, if I take this to court, there is only one thing about me that will be remembered. No matter what I have hypothesised or discovered, no matter what I achieve, I will spend the rest of my professional life being defined not by what I have done but by what has been done to me. I will be the woman in the George Craddock rape case. I will never be anything more.

  ‘Why are they still allowed to do this?’ A note of despair enters my voice, even though it’s a self-indulgence that should be beneath me.

  ‘If the issue is consent then you could argue the defence has no choice. Helps that you’re a person of good standing. Girls on housing estates…’ He shakes his head. ‘Young girls like that, been out drinking…’

  I am nauseous. ‘The people who defend these cases…’ I say quietly.

  Kevin shrugs, ‘There’s no shortage of them.’

  A long silence follows. You and Kevin both watch me, carefully, waiting. I feel a great wave of hopelessness washing over me. In order to make one last attempt to stop myself from drowning in it, I say, ‘What do you think our chances would be?’

  Kevin purses his lips again. ‘In court?’ He glances at you, then back at me, as if, for the first time, wondering just how honest he should be. ‘Well, these cases are notoriously difficult to prove…’ These cases, I think bitterly. I am one of these cases. ‘And this one would be very difficult. You were drunk. You spent the evening with him. So most people would ca
ll it a date rape.’ At the sound of that phrase, I flinch, visibly. Kevin pauses briefly, then continues. ‘The injuries might be helpful if there was a record but without one they are meaningless. And if there’s anything in your past, any evidence of dishonesty or lying, or worst of all any previous allegations of this sort – if it’s happened to you before your chances are zero.’

  It comes to me that you may have told Kevin to be honest as well. I am grateful.

  There is another long silence. Then I say, ‘Thank you for being so frank with me. Thank you for coming.’ I want to lighten the atmosphere a little before he goes. ‘Do you get asked to do this often, give informal advice I mean?’

  He grimaces in reply. ‘More often than you could imagine.’ He picks up his briefcase from the floor next to him and puts it on his lap. He is preparing to leave. He glances at you and hesitates for a fraction of a second, then asks you quietly, ‘Want me to log this conversation?’

  You look at him and, almost imperceptibly, shake your head.

  My gratitude toward Kevin makes me want to detain him. And I feel a sudden need to impress upon him that I am a person of agency, not just a victim. I look at him. He is mid-thirties, I guess. Probably living with his girlfriend. I imagine her as a nurse, perhaps, or a teacher, maybe a childhood sweetheart. No kids yet, talking about it. They both like a takeaway on a Friday night, a film on DVD. They hold barbecues at the weekend. They go to Homebase on Sundays to buy shelving and talk about whether they should go to Cyprus in the summer. In their own, understated, way, they love each other very much.

  ‘How do you do this?’ I ask. It’s a genuine question. ‘This sort of work, I mean.’ I imagine there are a lot more glamorous areas of policing he could be involved in. Murder squads, drugs, undercover work – and instead, he spends his time with this, with people like me.

  He looks surprised, as if this question has never occurred to him before. ‘I joined the police in order to catch criminals,’ he says simply.